


the opposite of your high school sweetheart

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Growing Up, Post-Canon, Rejection, fine i'll start spelling aelwen with a y. you got me.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24994639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: At the bimonthly Seven Maidens meetup, this time happening in the back office of Jones & Cleaver’s Wilderness Expeditions, they start the regular catching-up.“I’m thinking of going back to school,” Sam offers, and she's met with various congratulations and questions about where and when and studying what.When that conversation dies down Penny takes a fortifying gulp of her limeade and says, “I’m dating Aelwyn Abernant.”(Penny Luckstone lives her life in all its messy, unmysterious glory.)
Relationships: Aelwen Abernant/Penny Luckstone, Past Penny Luckstone/Sam Nightingale
Comments: 8
Kudos: 56





	the opposite of your high school sweetheart

**Author's Note:**

> “did you like her more when she was a mystery and not a person” - baron to riz at some point in sophomore year. “No” - me on the couch watching that episode.   
> this is based on my own hc that the seven maidens are across three years - Penny & Sam & Antiope & Danielle are seniors, Ostentatia & Katya are juniors, Zelda’s the youngest at sophomore as of fh:sophomore year. Is this the canon age distribution? Probably not but we’re going with it, i didn't go back and try to check.

The night after graduation they’re sitting side by side in Zelda’s treehouse, feet dangling over the edge. All the trees are strung with fairy lights, glowing softly golden-white in the evening. Below, the party rolls over into hour three with no sign of stopping.

Penny, buoyant with joy and buzzing with just enough champagne to make her feel very brave, turns her face to Sam’s and kisses her. 

It’s one of those movie-kisses, one of those kisses where the strings swell and the camera pans up to the stars and the credits start to roll. It’s the culmination of a year of glances and hugs and late night conversations, being the last ones awake at the sleepover. It’s the kind of kiss you think you can feel the rest of your life in—

“This is a bad idea,” Sam says, breaking away. 

The moment between them pops like a soap bubble. The noise of the party filters back in and Penny remembers how uncomfortable her shoes are, how her dress is rubbing against the sunburn across her shoulders. 

“Sorry,” she blurts, rejection making her feel cold all of the sudden. Cold and small. “Sorry, you’re right. Of course you’re right, sorry. The Maidens would—it’s a bad idea, of course!”

“I wouldn’t be good for you,” Sam starts to say, but Penny stops listening.

She’s cold and small and pain is starting to turn into anger, building in her stomach.  _ That’s not your call to make,  _ she wants to yell,  _ it’s not your job to decide what’s good for me. _

It would be so much better if Sam would just say she doesn’t feel the same, even though that’s a lie and Penny knows it’s a lie.  _ I wouldn’t be good for you  _ is either an excuse or a revelation that Sam thinks she can’t make her own choices.

“It’s fine!” she chirps, trying to get cheerful words out past the tears building in her throat, the anger churning in her gut. “I misread the signals, it’s fine!”

Antiope catches her eye from across the backyard, a frown crossing her face as she squints, taking the two of them in. She starts across the grass and Penny looks at Sam, commits the sacrificial resolve on her face to memory.

“Enjoy the rest of the party,” she says softly, forcing her voice not to break as she climbs down the ladder to meet Antiope, who wraps an arm around her shoulders and walks her towards the front of the house.

She ends up across town on a beanbag in Ostentatia’s room, Zelda murmuring reassurances and braiding her hair.

“Sorry to take you away from the party,” she says between tissues, and Zelda hums.

“I’m not much of a partier anyways.” 

She fans the back of Penny’s neck, breeze blessedly cool against her hot skin. Ostentatia comes back in with a wet washcloth and helps her wipe her face.

They never talk about this night again. To be fair, they don’t talk about a lot of things after the oldest Maidens graduate.

\---

Penny makes it through a semester of statistics and intro to criminology classes at Bastion City University before having the alarming realization that she’s still somewhat structuring her life around the kid she used to babysit. It’d be better to have this realization in her room, probably, but if anyone hears her crying in the bathroom next to the computer lab for twenty minutes, they don’t mention it.

_ What the fuck,  _ she types into the group chat,  _ what the fuck am i doing here. _

She doesn’t send the text. She spends the next twenty hours sending emails and going to the walk-in hours at the academic advising office and cursing herself under her breath. At some point she has to laugh, because how ridiculous is this? Of course she doesn’t want to do—she fucking hates statistical analysis, no matter how good people say she is at it. It makes her want to swing a bat at her laptop.

“Come over,” Danielle says over the crystal, twelve hours into Penny’s grand realization that her life has been all about pleasing other people and nothing belongs to her alone. “You’re always welcome in the woods with me, come over. I can open up a tree and you can be here in a minute. Maybe BCU wasn’t the right fit right now, it’s okay.”

But the thing with that is, Penny really loves school. She loves the terrible, overpriced coffee they sell in the library. She loves going to lectures and taking notes until her hand aches every day, she loves meeting for discussion sessions, she loves the creative writing course she took this semester for the art credit. One of her poems got accepted into the poetry journal; it’s gonna be published in the spring, and she loves that.

“Don’t tell the others,” she begs Danielle, because she can’t let this panic spill over into the rest of the Maidens. Zelda’s seventeenth birthday was two weeks ago, she’s still got a year at Aguefort after this one and she needs Penny to be strong and figure out leaving home before she decides if  _ she  _ wants to do it. Ostentatia and Katya are halfway through their senior year and she can’t add to their stress and Antiope’s busy getting her ranger certification and Sam’s, it’s still complicated with Sam. The only reason she called Danielle is because Danielle’s off guarding ten acres of forest outside of Birchburg as a test to see how in-tune with nature she is, safely far away from their biweekly Seven Maidens meetups.

“I’m here for you,” Danielle says, not promising anything of the kind.

This becomes relevant an hour later, after Penny’s had another cup of coffee and is almost vibrating at the desk in her room, staring at her inbox with aching eyes while she waits for her request to change majors to be reviewed. 

Sam calls her. 

“Danielle called me,” is her greeting, and she listens as Penny wails into the crystal about financial aid and her grades and the ever-shrinking treasure from the Red Wastes and:

“My parents think I’m going to become a crime statistics analyst and I’m going to let them  _ down!” _

Sam waits for her to be quiet before speaking. “Your parents,” she says slowly, “want you to be happy. And alive—they’re pretty happy you’re not adventuring full-time, remember? As long as you’re safe, they won’t be upset.”

“What would you know about it,” Penny snaps, “you have no idea how they’ll feel.”

“Now’s a bad time to have this conversation,” Sam sighs. “You need to  _ sleep.” _

“Oh, because you  _ totally  _ know what’s good for me, huh?” As soon as it leaves her mouth, she regrets it.

Sam is quiet for a long time.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that—”

“Let’s make a list of goals,” Sam says mechanically, “and then you can go to sleep, okay?”

They get five potential next steps down on paper before Penny starts to crash, a night without sleep and six cups of coffee catching up with her. 

“Goodnight,” Sam tells her.

“It’s three in the afternoon,” she retorts, and she hears Sam laugh before she falls asleep, dead to the world for the next fourteen hours.

_ Thanks,  _ she texts Sam at five. 

_ It’ll be ok,  _ is the response an hour later, and Penny believes her.

\---

Ostentatia and Katya graduate at the turning of the summer and it feels like picking at a scab, when Penny comes back to Elmville to go to their party. They’ve had five months to carefully build their friendship back up, but a year ago at this tree in Zelda’s yard, Sam broke her heart. Maybe it’s stupid to still think about it, maybe they would’ve broken up by now anyway, crashed and burned in an awful way, but it still stings.

Sam’s staying on the opposite side of the party—they’ll be fine tomorrow, Penny thinks, but right now she sees Gorgug and Zelda grinning at each other over the snack table and kind of wants to break something. Zelda’s parents would be cool with it, she’s pretty sure. 

This is where she meets Aelwyn Abernant in person for the first time. Under the tree where Sam broke her heart, there’s an elf leaning against the trunk and watching the party with sharp eyes, half-hidden under the sweep of her hair. Penny follows her gaze and realizes she’s tracking Ostentatia, moving in response to her movements and staying out of her sightline, tucking herself further into the shadow cast by the treehouse.

_ This is a bad idea,  _ her good sense says, sounding more like Sam than usual. Penny’s entitled to a few bad ideas. She walks over to the tree.

Aelwyn gives her a crooked smile when she slips under a couple low-hanging branches and leans next to her.

“You’re... Penny, right?” she asks, and there’s a guardedness in her eyes that’s nowhere in her voice.

“And you’re Aelwyn. Adaine’s sister, right?”

This is how the conversation goes, neither of them mentioning Kalvaxus or palimpsests. Surface-level stuff. They talk about school—turns out Aelwyn’s doing abjuration theory work in the BCU Arcane Department while Penny’s switched to literature with a focus on Throshkian dream narratives—and Aelwyn loses her tension by degrees. 

Their talking comes to an end when Aelwyn tilts her head to the side, gaze going distant. 

“Okay,” she says, and Penny knows she’s talking to someone else. “Let me know if you need anything?”

She looks back at Penny, who speaks up. “You’re leaving now, huh?”

“My sister invited me,” she says, looking a little embarrassed. “And she’s leaving now, so.”

“Well, if you see me around campus you should say hi!” Penny says it mostly to be polite, because it’s the kind of thing you say, but she ends up with Aelwyn’s crystal number and another crooked smile before the elf vanishes in a teleport spell.

She makes Aelwyn a contact. It couldn’t hurt.

\---

Somehow, over the next three years, Aelwyn Abernant becomes her friend. No, really, Penny knows her coffee order and Aelwyn knows what kind of pie she likes from the diner near campus. She shows up to the monthly poetry nights when Penny’s reading and Penny helps keep her out of the abjuration lab so the Arcane Theory Club can set up a surprise for her birthday.

It’s not the only thing that happens to her, of course. Somewhere in her second year it stops hurting to think about Sam altogether. Violet, a tiefling in her philosophy of language course, asks if she wants to get coffee sometime. They go on three dates before she gets accepted to study abroad in the elemental plane of fire—Penny helps throw her goodbye party and they part as friends.

In her third year, she becomes an editor for the poetry journal. The entire journal works way too hard to help coordinate the first annual Arts & Literature Fest! (exclamation point mandatory on all promotional material) and when they’re cleaning up tables Beatrice, her fellow editor and sometimes-rival when it comes to identifying motifs, kisses her while she’s got a bunch of streamers and tape and garbage in her hands. They last longer, spend whole afternoons on a picnic blanket next to the pond, writing awful sonnets. There’re never any declarations of feelings, at least not in their own words, but she fills a notebook with unironic love poems anyway. It ends when Beatrice has to knuckle down and finish her senior project and Penny realizes they haven’t seen each other in ten days, and she’s not that broken up about it.

The two constants in her life are the Maidens and Aelwyn. Zelda’s finishing her last year at Agueforts, trying to set a record for ‘least on-campus rages as a Barbarian.’ Sam’s working at a nonprofit focused on pollution law and Danielle’s area of influence expands—she’s charged with protecting the greater Birchburg area, and there’re rumors that when Mt. Shieldgaze’s druid retires she’s on the shortlist of candidates. Antiope and Katya are working on some kind of business plan that they haven’t revealed yet, but everybody knows it’s got  _ something  _ to do with forests. And Ostentatia’s sticking close to Elmville, taking guitar lessons and considering multiclassing.

Penny and Aelwyn go to a dozen free events each semester, concerts and pumpkin carving and hot chocolate during finals. Sometimes Penny finds herself laughing at a comment and catches Aelwyn watching her a moment too long before looking away.  _ Sometimes  _ it’s ten at night and she’s stomping into the Arcane Theory building to drag Aelwyn back to her apartment to sleep because the elf has ran out of magic before teleporting home and decided, fuck it, seems like a good idea to just  _ work all night. _

Penny tucks her into the couch despite her protests that she doesn’t need to sleep, gives her an extra blanket because it’s  _ winter  _ and it’s  _ cold  _ and she  _ saw  _ Aelwyn shiver when they got off the bus. In the morning after this particular time, when she comes to her tiny kitchen and finds that she’s started thinking of one of the mugs as  _ Aelwyn’s mug,  _ she has to stop and take a deep breath.

_ This is a bad idea,  _ her good sense warns her, as she puts two spoons of sugar into her mug and reaches for the hazelnut creamer for Aelwyn. Violet and Beatrice were never really her  _ friends  _ the way that Aelwyn is, the way that Sam is, and this is a risk—

She shakes it off. They’re friends, good friends; it’s not like it was with Sam, sneaking looks during homeroom and pining for a year before making a move. With Aelwyn she never feels like there’s something missing. It’s fine that she wants to hold her hand—it’ll pass. Or she’ll do it because they’re friends and it’s fine that they’re friends, it can just be that and it’s fine.

\---

And then Penny’s leaving the commencement ceremony and her parents’ happy tears, going home to the apartment she’s paying rent on with a combination of freelance adventuring gold and the truly miniscule royalties coming in from her first poetry volume. She’s got a spreadsheet made for graduation cards and thank-you notes and the future is the future is the future, stretching out in front of her.

She could go back to adventuring on a more full-time basis, look for contracts instead of signing on as an available retainer for Aguefort quests. There’s not a lock she can’t pick nor a foe she can’t sneak past at this point; for all that the Maidens can only all meet every two months and maybe take a weekend contract, her skills are as sharp as they’ve ever been.

Sam’s busy most of the time with work, and Katya and Antiope are in the first year of starting their wilderness expeditions, so they’re probably busy too. Danielle’s been promoted to a position as a guardian of Mt. Shieldgaze and it’s that time of year where she has to spend most days soothing earthquakes. Zelda might be free, and so might Ostentatia—one last hurrah? A test of career shift? 

She starts an email to Aguefort about any leads before giving it any more thought and he replies two minutes before she hits send, with the suggestion that they pick up another person to balance out the party. He isn’t wrong—she doesn’t like the odds of just the three of them as much as she might like.

_ This is a bad idea,  _ her good sense says, and she tells it to shut up because she’s busy calling Aelwyn.

“I was just thinking about you,” she says when she picks up, sounding a little frazzled. “I mean, hi, how’s it going?”

“Hey, are you busy? Wanna adventure? Me and you and Ostentatia and Zelda, I know it’s short notice, I get it if you can’t—”

“Yes.”

\---

The contract is pretty simple, though it requires some preparation and a weeklong horse ride. They end up at the coronation for the King of the Northern Baronies—well,  _ king  _ is kind of a strong word and  _ the Northern Baronies  _ is kind of a misnomer, there isn’t a unified region—but the geopolitical landscape isn’t under their purview. The four of them have been hired to keep the king away from any  _ accidents  _ before he’s crowned.

That’s what brings them to this party, the last day before they can leave. There’s a pavilion set up, an elaborate tent roof over a floor of packed earth, with a few rugs put down. Lanterns hang from the canvas at various heights, creating a nice atmosphere of warm light.

Ostentatia’s discussing religion with the clerics on one side of the space, disturbing the floor as with her foot as she sketches out various symbols and talks with them about omens and prophecy. Zelda’s on the other side near the musicians that have gathered, tapping a hoof in time with the beat of a drum. 

Aelwyn’s moving through the crowd like a shark, the gray-blue of her doublet bringing out her eyes. She never misses an occasion to dress the part, and the  _ current  _ part is ‘ambitious elf trying to curry favor with the king and his gathered generals.’ She isn’t dressed to  _ belong,  _ she’s dressed to draw the eye. Or maybe it’s just that she’s drawing Penny’s eye.

(“It’s the best way to ferret out the bad ones,” she proposes, when they first meet to go over the contract. “You catch more flies, and all that.”

“I don’t see how this is honey,” Penny says, a little nervous now that the four of them are in the room together. She doesn’t know—she and Aelwyn have talked about Kalvaxus, but she doesn’t know if Aelwyn and  _ Ostentatia  _ have, and it’s throwing her off a little bit.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be sweet—” Aelwyn seems to catch herself, shaking her head a little. “I used the wrong metaphor. How about, ‘like attracts like?’”

“We can each fit in with one of the factions that’s going to be there,” Ostentatia nods. “Me with the clerics, her with the military. There will be musicians, probably—Zelda, you could be there with them?”

“I could be there  _ for  _ them, as a guest,” Zelda corrects. “It’s bad luck to turn a follower of Faunus away, when you’re a musician. At least they say that in the Baronies. I can be part of the audience.”

“Where does that leave me?” Penny wonders.

“That’s easy,” Aelwyn scoffs, “you’re the princess we’re all following.”

“What?” Penny feels, she feels—how is that  _ easy? _

Aelwyn goes a little pink and Ostentatia jumps back in, shooting the elf a knowing look; “There’s going to be a lot of far-flung representatives there, right? A merchant princess representing an important family makes as much sense as anything else.”

“I’m not very... princess-y.”

“It’s a vanity title,” Zelda reassures her, which is easy for  _ Zelda  _ to say, nobody’s asking  _ her  _ to be a princess. 

“It’ll play,” Aelwyn says, confident. “We can work on more of a cover story if you want, but this one’s easy enough to put together. Just don’t get married to anyone and don’t let the king die, and we’re golden.”)

So, she’s dancing. Her head is uncomfortably heavy, hair woven with intricate metal flowers, and she’s sweating under the heavy silk of her dress as she tries not to give anything suspicious away to the king’s aide acting as her partner.

“May I cut in,” Aelwyn’s voice says at her side, mercifully providing her an out from the uncomfortable conversation. He’s their current prime suspect, after all, and Penny’s not keen on dancing with a potential murderer. Aelwyn’s called it cliche, that the king’s best friend would betray him for power, but the cliche exists for a reason.

Her hand is cool in Penny’s and she’s seemingly unbothered by the venomous glare the man gives her. She pays him absolutely no attention, calmly leading the next dance. They murmur about suspicious activity for a few moments, catching each other up, but the song is much longer than any updates on the status of the party and they both eventually go quiet.

Penny looks up into her eyes, sees her haloed by one of the many lanterns that dot the party—oh. 

_ Oh, this is a bad idea,  _ she tells herself, heart thumping as Aelwyn guides her through the next spin, hands steady and sure.  _ This is a very bad idea. _

“Aelwyn,” she starts, something tremulous in her voice.

Of course, the lanterns choose this exact minute to start exploding.

\---

Later, cleaning scrapes and piling on ice packs as Ostentatia tends to the miraculously still-breathing, newly-appointed monarch, Aelwyn catches the hand that’s cleaning a cut on her forehead and presses a kiss to the back of it.

She’s got her crooked smile on and she’s keeping up the fiction of herself as the social climber and Penny as her potential patron princess but her  _ eyes— _

Aelwyn watches her all the way back to Solace, gaze burning into the back of her neck. How long has Aelwyn been looking at her like that? When did she start? How can Penny convince her to never look away?

“Wanna go on a trip?” she asks when they leave her bank, gold bars from the king deposited in her account, carefully divided between herself and the hope that her parents will start accepting money from her.

It’s a gray day and she’s wearing a soft sweater, cozy in the unseasonably cold weather. Aelwyn gave it to her last winter, actually. That might be one of the reasons she picked it today. Maybe.

“Didn’t we just get back?” Aelwyn laughs.

“I mean you and me. Let’s just, let’s just rent a car and go to the coast or something.”  _ This is a bad idea,  _ her good sense pipes up, but she’s starting to think that it isn’t her good sense at all.  _ Be bold,  _ she tells herself,  _ be brave. _

“With who else?” Aelwyn asks, something serious starting to cross her face.

“Just us.”  _ Be brave. _

Aelwyn’s looking at her, crooked smile nowhere to be seen. But her eyes, her eyes—Penny takes her hand as they walk toward the bus stop and her cheeks burning.

“Wanna go?” she asks again, looking to Aelwyn, whose gaze is fixed on their interlocked fingers.

“Where?”

“The coast, the beach,”  _ anywhere,  _ Penny thinks, and her good sense has nothing to say.  _ I’d go anywhere with you. _

“Yes,” Aelwyn rasps five minutes later, when they’re waiting for the bus.

Above them, the rain starts and Penny swears softly, wishing for an umbrella or a hood or anything. Aelwyn mutters an incantation and the air above the two of them wavers, solidifies. The rain patters down against her barrier, the smell of it in the air.

Aelwyn reaches slowly, bending down and telegraphing her movements, to tuck a strand of Penny’s hair back with the hand she’s not holding.

Her face is so close; Penny barely has to move, and she presses forward the last few inches to kiss her. When they separate Penny realizes they’re both sodden, that the rain’s been pelting down unimpeded.

“Lost my concentration,” Aelwyn says, looking away and blushing. 

“That’s okay,” Penny squeezes her hand. “You know I like the rain.”

\---

At the bimonthly Seven Maidens meetup, this time happening in the back office of Jones & Cleaver’s Wilderness Expeditions, they start the regular catching-up.

“I’m thinking of going back to school,” Sam offers, and is met with various congratulations and questions about where and when and studying what.

When that conversation dies down Penny takes a fortifying gulp of her limeade and says, “I’m dating Aelwyn Abernant.” 

_ “I knew it!”  _ one of her friends yells above the explosion of noise.  _ “Told you so!” _

Sam smiles, wading into demands for gossip and adding her voice to the questions. Zelda and Ostentatia exchange looks and clink their drinks together, Ostentatia smirking and Zelda with a little shake of her head.

Penny, apparently entirely predictable if the exclamation that everybody was  _ waiting for this  _ can be believed, can’t help but laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> this setting lets me have a coronation and a college graduation in the same fic; thank you dimension 20.   
> the sam/penny feelings at the beginning aren’t really unrequited, but sam’s in full “i’m not good enough for her and i can’t drag her down with me” mode, which penny takes as “i know what’s best for you and you don’t” - they’re really talking at cross-purposes during the graduation party and it ends up being pretty sad! but life keeps going after and they both end up pretty happy, even if it takes time to build back up their friendship after the beginning of the fic.  
> i hope this was fun! i'm very invested in everyone having time to heal and also eventually be girlfriends.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think!


End file.
